Shifting the Silence

Etel Adnan

Shifting the Silence does just that: breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. Published in the year before her death, Adnan enumerated in this book her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.